


always back to you

by KilltheDJ



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Car Accidents, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, The Crash Track, The Fabulous Killjoys (Danger Days) Are Not MCR
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:28:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28779048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KilltheDJ/pseuds/KilltheDJ
Summary: “You’re a bitch,” Sandman mumbles affectionately, his head tucked into the crook of Kobra’s neck, black curls tickling the bottom of Kobra’s jaw. “And you owe me one for patchin’ you up after you slammed the door on me. Fuck you.”
Relationships: Kobra Kid/Mr. Sandman (Fall Out Boy)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 23





	always back to you

**Author's Note:**

> for nonny, who requested sandkid hurt/comfort ! i am so sorry i do not know how to make them soft without making it hurt !  
> content warnings include: graphic descriptions of injury, a few light mentions of booze, past fighting, and motorcycle accidents !

When the sun goes down and the lights come out, they don’t talk. 

They haven’t talked in a long time - hundreds of things into one that makes it ache when they think back, the echo of lips crashing and queasy stomachs from century-old candy and the heartache that settles just under the rib cage when your lungs are too tired to shout anymore. 

It’s all too much when they’re together. Love and longing and one of them always fucks it up and they’re careful not to come into contact with each other for this reason - because it means they can’t get attached again and it means they can’t get their heart broken again. 

But once something’s been broken by the same person over and over again, they learn intimately how to put it together again, with careful shaking hands and a sly smile and  _ that’s  _ why it’s so dangerous, really. 

Sandman’s rarely at the Crash Track, nowadays, because of that. 

It’s a ticking-time-bomb, and he knows this, because the Crash Track is notorious for some of its patrons, and those include the one person he avoided the most.  _ The Kobra Kid.  _

And, really, he should  _ know  _ that he’d run out of luck a long time ago, and it’s inevitable, and still, here he is, on the med-team for the day, because most of the races from noon till sunset were going to be over Demolition Drift and  _ everyone  _ crashes out there. 

Usually, they end up in the ditch, so Sandman’s sitting in the sand with his legs pulled up to his chest, picking at the sand, the weeds, dirt under his nails, waiting for someone to wreck out. It isn’t an  _ if,  _ it’s a  _ when.  _

The sound of the engines bothers him. It’s nothing new, honestly, but he isn’t wearing a helmet because he’s not racing and all he’s got is the First Aid kit sitting next to him, and the engines are  _ loud  _ and growling when they approach, and then it’s even  _ worse  _ to look at them from  _ underneath,  _ seeing the bikes jump over the ditch, from about ten feet away.

As the medic, he doesn’t feel like being the one getting smashed to bits under one of those things. 

He used to race, honestly, and it isn’t that he stopped out of  _ fear,  _ but because of a bad wreck - he wasn’t even the one who’d gotten hurt. But it made him realize what exactly he’s risking every time he goes out and his own bike has been shelved for a while. 

He knows that, if he sits up, he can see exactly who’s on the horizon. He  _ knows  _ the sound of that engine because he helped build it. He knows there’s a loose screw in the middle of the engine somewhere because he’d gotten distracted while screwing it in, kisses pressed to his scalp, and he’d dropped it. 

Or maybe Kobra had fished it out at some point. Who knows? Who cares? 

(Sandman does. He cares more than he should. Maybe that’s why he volunteered to be a medic for the day despite the fact that he hasn’t raced in years and his ex is the star of the place, anyway. Were they even exes? Last they’d spoken was a blow-out fight and then silence.) 

The bikes are getting closer. He knows this because he can hear them, and he wishes he’d taken a pair of those sound-muffling headphones when he had the chance. His ears are sensitive and it was a bad call. 

It’s a bad call to be here in the first place. 

_ Crash time.  _

The Crash Track got its name for good reason, from the glass of windshields littering the ground to the littering of spare metal parts, twisted in ways they shouldn’t, that littered the edges of ditches like this. 

It’s no surprise the first bike flies over the ramp at the top of the little ditch Sandman’s sitting in, but something  _ fucked up,  _ and the tire skidded over the edge of the ramp rather than the center, and when the back tire loses traction, the jump is over before it even begins. 

_ He recognizes that paint.  _

Usually, things like this, he doesn’t have the  _ time  _ to think about stuff like that, but it’s in slow motion, almost. 

Things like that happen around him. The shadows pulling him in a little more than strictly feasible, time slowing to watch things as they play out, things he should never have the time to process. 

But it’s okay. 

Because it means he’s on his feet and moving toward the wreckage before the bike hits the ground, before a guttural scream echoes through the air with blood on the familiar paint job, marring a painted-on  **_27,_ ** and fuck, yeah, this wasn’t a good idea. 

He doesn’t have the time to think about his bad luck and  _ Kobra’s  _ bad luck as he rushes to his side, an ominous smoke coming from the wreckage, the scream dying out. 

Hopefully, Kobra will pass out from the pain, because Sandman doesn’t know what he’ll do if he doesn’t - because having a four-hundred-pound bike fall on top of you in Demolition Drift, known for the pieces of metal and glass in the pre-existing sand of the ditch,  _ isn’t a fucking good thing.  _

Kobra isn’t passed out. 

But Sandman’s already kneeling by the bike, the hulking First Aid kid by his side, ripped jeans doing nothing to cover his knees and they  _ hurt  _ so he can’t imagine how bad Kobra looks, and there are so many pieces that he doesn’t know where to start. 

Either way, he can recognize they’re lucky in that the bike is completely on top of Kobra, not a mess of limbs and there isn’t all too much blood, beyond what got onto the paint. That’s good, at least, but the bike is heavier than Sandman thought it would be when he gripped the handlebars, and  _ fuck,  _ they need to get out of the danger zone. 

There would be another wreck, and soon - it’s Demolition Drift and the sun is high and for some reason, it’s sort of a legend around the Crash Track, that if Kobra crashes, it’s bad luck for  _ everyone.  _

Which is odd, considering Kobra’s off his game more than half the time, and even during that half he  _ is  _ on his game, he gets distracted by the motion blur of the landscape. 

(Sandman had seen him crash into the side of an old barn, once. The structure was fine, and so was 27, but Kobra wasn’t. They sat up in the rafters of the old barn until Benze had gotten there with gauze and a wrist brace and some pain killers for Kobra’s arm.) 

_ Out of the danger zone.  _

The bike’s fine. He stands it up, cursing to himself when the damn wheel digs into Kobra’s stomach and he realizes too late that having that on one’s stomach could be fatal, pushing it to the side and wincing at the sound it made when it hit the ground again. 

The bike is not as important as the person and Sandman really wants to stop playing nurse to that fucker. Maybe Kobra needs his own luck locket, because he tends to get injured and Sandman keeps having the luck of being the one - 

Fuck, right, focus on dragging the semi-conscious, injured Killjoy through a ditch of glass and metal. Objectively, it’s better than leaving him there to get crushed underneath another bike. 

Why did he bring the First Aid kit over to the initial site? 

Dumbass, dumbass. 

Sandman grunts to himself, rolling his eyes at the slurred curses coming out of Kobra’s mouth because he  _ sure as hell  _ hasn’t realized who his doctor is today, or else he’d either be trying to apologize or try some more colorful curses. 

“Suck it up,” Sandman hisses, though he doesn’t know what he’s telling Kobra to  _ suck up.  _ Their entire relationship, probably, considering that’s what he always fucking drunkenly radioed Sandman about. 

(Honestly, you think he’d realized that Sandman’s already far too invested. Just buy him some apology flowers from Zone Five and they’ll be  _ fine  _ again, regardless of whether that’s a smart idea or not.) 

At the very least, Kobra isn’t struggling all too much, but that’s a double-edged blade in that Sandman doesn’t want to know  _ why  _ the stubborn goddamn Killjoy isn’t trying to fight him every step of the way. 

By now, he’s dragged Kobra back to the little spot he was sitting on, out of the danger zone, and dragged the First Aid kit back, too, and now he has to figure out where that fucking  _ blood  _ is coming from, and Witch, he’s glad Kobra’s wearing a helmet. 

They’d fought about that, once. 

Kobra wouldn’t wear his helmet because he said it was too hot and stuffy and it made him dizzy and nauseous, though Sandman had been more than certain he only thought that because he was convincing himself there was a reason beyond the deathwish held in his heart’s vice grip. Kobra hasn’t gotten better about that. 

But it’s probably the only reason he isn’t dead right now, so Sandman will take that s a win, hastily unzipping Kobra’s stupid  _ red  _ jacket to figure out where the blood is coming from.

Surprisingly enough, his legs look fine - they aren’t torn and Sandman can’t see anything that’s darkened with blood. 

For having a bike land on him, that’s pretty fucking good. 

So where the hell is the blood coming from? 

Oh. Right. 

With Kobra’s jacket zipped down, struggling to get the sleeves off, Kobra makes a pained cry, nothing nearly as bad as that first scream. But enough to tell Sandman that it’s his  _ arm,  _ and yeah, hadn’t he been lying on his arm when Sandman found him? 

That’s not good, no good at all. Because, either way, he needs to get the sleeve off, and he abandons Kobra’s jacket for all of a second to gently take the helmet off, setting it to the side and momentarily holding his palm above Kobra’s eyes, shielding him from the light until it wouldn’t burn.

Which is around three seconds, because Kobra’s  _ health  _ over his  _ comfort,  _ right? If it was up to Kobra, he’d probably want to sit there in the ditch bleeding out, anyway. 

So, that’s why Sandman doesn’t let himself feel guilty as he pries Kobra’s arm out of the jacket’s sleeve, ignoring the mewling sounds of protest, and  _ fuck,  _ yeah, this is one of the times Sandman’s happy that Kobra’s the type of dumbass to not wear a shirt underneath a leather jacket. 

It means he’s all sweaty, but it also means it’s easy to identify the source of the bleeding and how Kobra’s arm isn’t supposed to be twisted like that, and without the confines of the jacket, it’s starting to swell. 

_ That’s  _ why it was so damn hard to take off. 

“I’m gonna need you to not scream,” says Sandman, though he has little hope that Kobra’s even lucid enough to understand him - he just needs Kobra to stay still long enough for him to get a gauge on how bad the injury is, and to do that, he needs to clean up the blood. 

That’s why he’s worried about Kobra screaming, because he thrashes when he screams, and therefore, that’s  _ bad.  _ Kobra can’t fuck this up because it’s his  _ arm  _ and it’s his left arm, sure, but it’s still important. 

(He’s reminded of the time he broke his collarbone, sparring on a roof-top with Kobra, somewhere in Zone One, falling off the edge of the roof and hitting the edge of a crate just so that the bone was fractured. Kobra had been his nurse, then. It was one of the only times the roles were reversed.) 

Kobra doesn’t give any sound of recognition, and Sandman doesn’t even have to look over at the opened First Aid kid to wrap his hand around a bottle of rubbing alcohol, that he’s about to pour over Kobra’s arm - from his wrist to his elbow, that’s what’s covered in blood, though it seems to be from his elbow, which isn’t twisted the right way. 

It’s going to be a long day. 

_ 

You know, waking up with your arm aching isn’t usually how Kobra wakes up, but he doesn’t bother to question it for around twenty seconds until he realizes that it isn’t ridiculously hot out, he’s not wearing his gear, and the last thing he remembered was approaching the ramp on Demolition Drift with too much red in his vision to think about what he was doing. 

_ Fuck.  _ Not a good call. 

With the other tracks, it’s fine, because he knows them by heart and they’ll never change, but Demolition Drift is a special case, though he doesn’t remember whether it was the  _ ramp  _ that he crashed out on, or the sharp, near ninety-degree turn right after it. 

Huh. Probably a good thing, then. 

Either way, he sits up far too quickly and it’s jarring to realize he can’t use both arms for that, and looking down and finding his tattoos staring back at him, across his torso, and yeah, why the fuck isn’t he wearing a shirt? 

(It isn’t like he’d been wearing a shirt when he went out to the Track - too tired and too pissed off to do anything more than throw a jacket on, but that means he should probably still have a jacket on.) 

The cast on his arm should tell him that. 

“It’s not actually bad enough for a cast,” muses someone next to him, and if Kobra jumps out of his skin and gets halfway through suckering punching them before his punch is easily blocked, neither of them mention it. 

Ah. He  _ knows  _ that face.  _ Sandman.  _ Of fucking course. 

“Then why the hell am I wearing one?” he answers, because there’s still a wave of light anger thrumming through his veins and he doesn’t feel like putting the effort into fixing his bridges, not tonight, not when he still has to go back to the Diner and apologize to Poison. 

And do some bodywork on the Trans Am, because he’s more than certain that he’d dented the hood when he’d slammed his fist into it like a fucking child throwing a temper tantrum. (That’s the problem with staying up for too long, he supposes.) 

Sandman isn’t here for his bullshit, though, and he knows that from the crossed arms and the bored expression. Kobra wonders how many times he’s made Sandman cry in the last year alone. He decides to shelve those thoughts. “Because I’m sure you’d take off your brace if we gave you one. You’ve got a hell of a lot of luck, though, I can tell you that.” 

“My arm is in a cast. What luck is that?” 

“The luck that deemed you have a broken arm and not a shattered pelvis or two fractured legs.” Well, that much is true. Kobra’s not giving him the benefit of the doubt, though, if only because he’s still intent on being stubborn. Sandman continues, anyway. “It was pretty damn gruesome, though. I sent your jacket down to Cherri to get washed.” 

Maybe being shirtless with a broken arm wasn’t that bad so long as Cherri’s washing his jacket and he doesn’t have to pull out the puppy dog eyes. 

“Why’d you crash out, Sunflower?” Sandman asks, and  _ fuck,  _ no, no, no they can’t do this today, this week, this  _ month,  _ this  _ year,  _ because he’s fucked it up so much and he keeps fucking up so why does Sandman keep calling him that? 

Why does Sandman bother  _ caring  _ when they’ve both fucked each other over? 

It’s like a game, and they don’t know how to win, how to lose, or how to quit. Just keep going, and Kobra can’t  _ stand it,  _ because every time Sandman calls him that, he  _ melts  _ and there’s nothing to keep him from thinking about it. 

Save for the currently dulled pain in his arm (what kind of fucking painkillers did they give him? Oh, they were probably one of Benzedrine’s concoctions.), but he has a feeling Sandman would knock him upside the head if he tried to bash his arm against something. 

Yeah, Sandman would  _ definitely  _ hit him on the side of the head for that. Apparently, he isn’t supposed to do that and  _ needs better coping mechanisms  _ or something like that. Bullshit. 

So, Kobra closes his eyes, shutting them tight as though it’ll make everything better and he can forget about the last week and the last time he talked to Sandman and the apologies constantly on the tip of his tongue that he never actually gave. 

“I crashed out because I wasn’t paying attention,” he says, and that much is true, and they both know that it isn’t the full story and that Sandman’ll press him, so he continues, and his words are slow, like he’s saying them for the first time all over again. Like it’s  _ paining  _ him to bother being a decent person. “Poison and I got into this fight last night. He says I need to stop  _ starting  _ fights and being self-destructive and I called him a hypocrite.” 

“Well, you do need to stop that, and he is a hypocrite. I can’t imagine why that went on for hours.” Because they both know it  _ did  _ go on for hours, knowing Kobra and Poison’s ability and penchant for arguing, about screaming for twenty minutes, five minutes of silence until there’s another itch for the noise. 

“It went a little deeper than that. It’s always the same shit on a different day,” Kobra says, as though he isn’t the one that craves the fighting more than he craves love, because love never gets him anywhere, does it? 

A fight, at least, gives him a bruise for a week or two or scars him long enough to let the emotional damage seep in. 

(Damn. Sometimes he realizes why Sandman calls him a mess. Maybe he should work on that, huh?) 

Sandman just hums, a tune that Kobra remembers, something that he thinks he used to sing Sandy when he was drunk and soft and willing to let himself indulge. It’s been a few years. “You keep livin’ like you’re still seventeen, y’know that?” 

“I don’t even know  _ how  _ old I am.” 

“That’s probably a good thing, then,” Sandman answers, and there’s a beat of silence between them, words hanging in the air like hail from a storm. Too much, too much, things they would never say until the world ended.

“... When can I go back home?” It’s the easiest thing to say, the thing with the least connotations so long as he doesn’t think about it for too long, so long as he doesn’t think about what waits for him, Poison’s disapproving look and the way Ghoul would flinch away from him and - 

And how he very much needs to apologize and make amends.  _ Fuck.  _ Yeah, yeah, too many connotations, talking  _ sucked,  _ but so did staying in his head. 

Sandman shrugs. “I could give you a ride, but I figure you’ll want to wait till 27 is fixed. Phoenix is workin’ on her, along with another bike of a runner who crashed. I assume you’ll want to stay in here until then?” 

Honestly, Kobra doesn’t know what he wants other than to get out of his own damn head.

So instead of saying anything, he just nods and pretends that everything is okay, because there’s still that dull ache in his arm, and if he stares at the ceiling and not his cast or the cot underneath him or Sandy sitting on a stool next to him, then it’s all fine and dandy. 

Fine and dandy, fine and dandy, he  _ isn’t  _ fine, he  _ isn’t  _ dandy, and he can’t do this on his own. Not if he feels like mending his bridges and staying clean and keep from having a breakdown over his stupid fucking motorbike that he’s far too emotionally attached to be healthy. 

Maybe that’s why he opens his stupid fucking mouth without thinking of the consequences. “You should come lay with me.” 

“And why would I do that, Sunflower?” Sandman asks, bemused, made clear by the expression on his face, and bemusement is better than betrayal, and Kobra’ll take it. 

“Because I’m your emotional foil who won’t leave you alone and I’m good at cuddling?” Well, half of that sentence is true, though he’s questioning how much he genuinely needs human contact before he goes back to thinking about all the things he fucked up. 

He shouldn’t ask Sandman to be his damn coping mechanism. 

He shouldn’t, and he is, and he’s selfish, and Sandman isn’t sitting on the stool anymore, but wiggling his way underneath the thin blanket Kobra has over him, in the bed that’s far too small for the two of them, and suddenly he doesn’t care about being selfish. 

“You’re a bitch,” Sandman mumbles affectionately, his head tucked into the crook of Kobra’s neck, black curls tickling the bottom of Kobra’s jaw. “And you owe me one for patchin’ you up after you slammed the door on me. Fuck you.” 

_ Fuck you  _ is usually what they say instead of  _ I love you,  _ or  _ I wish I knew how to say I love you when I can’t understand any of my emotions,  _ so Kobra knows they’re okay, and he pushes away the queasiness in his stomach when he thinks about that. 

Instead, he puts his good arm around Sandman, aiming for the waist and ending up just slinging it across Sandman’s back, and everything’s okay, for once, everything’s okay and he’ll be okay and maybe they’ll be okay. 

If he gets tears in Sandman’s hair, Sandy doesn’t say a word, and Kobra doesn’t bring it up again. 

**Author's Note:**

> !!!! THOUGHTS !


End file.
